The Editor's Corner: The $140 Shampoo

Jane Chesnutt discusses a lesson in value distilled from a bottle of shampoo

By Jane Chesnutt

I’m about to shock you: I just spent $93 on a 12-ounce container of shampoo. And that was the amazon.com price (list is $140). Go ahead and indulge in your outrage, but hear me out. Because this isn’t about shampoo, it’s about the values we put on things, and how that doesn’t always equate to what economics or society (or both) has deemed they really cost.

But first, that shampoo. It’s called Russian Amber, a funny brownish, rubbery goo of a substance, and I read about it in another magazine, in a column written by a beauty editor whom I know to be top-of-the-line good at her craft. She’s a grownup, and she was quite upfront in acknowledging that $140 is an insane amount to pay for shampoo. And yet, she kept saying, the stuff really works. Your hair is thicker, styles better, keeps longer. There’s a noticeable difference, you don’t have to wash your hair as often and every day becomes a good hair day.

I don’t think I’ve been upset over having a bad hair day once in the last 25 years, but neither has my happiness level with my hair been at 100 percent lately. So I was intrigued. Still, I would have turned the page and forgotten the stuff except for one little comment, about how a little girl had said, after her mom started using it, “Mommy’s got pretty hair now!” Kids don’t lie.

I ripped out the page, set it on the kitchen counter and thought for a couple of days. This is where things got interesting, because what was going on in my head wasn’t the normal “Do I or don’t I?” conversation. It wasn’t about whether I could afford a hundred dollars (by then I’d been on Amazon and knew I could get it at that price). I can. I could have gone out and spent the same amount on a pair of shoes, or 100 other things, and not thought twice. But this was shampoo, for gosh sakes, and it’s just not acceptable to spend that kind of money on that kind of product.

But why shouldn’t it be, I asked myself? Why is it that it’s OK to spend $100 on a pair of shoes that wind up in the back of your closet, worn only once or twice, but not that much for a product you’ll use a couple of times a week and derive pleasure from? I promptly went back to Amazon and clicked “Buy Now.”

I realized long ago that most of us do not have straight-line relationships with money. My beloved Uncle CC, for example, was an extraordinary tightwad in almost every respect, and every member of my family has several stories of his thrift. The first time I saw duct tape was on the chair CC sat in to watch TV; it was holding it together. Still, it was CC who took me out as a young teenager for my first expensive meal in a very nice restaurant, and CC who would slip me $20 every time he saw me when I was in college. I also noticed that he didn’t stint on either travel or theater, both of which he loved. I may not have turned out to be nearly as thrifty as CC would have liked (as you can tell, he set high standards on that score), but his basic attitude of save-here-to-spend-there took hold with me.

Which leads me to the issue of value. I suspect I’m going to take a fair amount of heat from some of you about that shampoo. But as you castigate me for my wastefulness, just keep in mind that I’m pretty confident I could come into each of your lives and use the same terms for at least one purchase that gives you great pleasure. (I’d probably start with those enormous TVs, which cost far more than $100 and which seem to have entered the necessity category for most people.)

Will I buy another jar when this one runs out? I don’t know yet, but I have lots of time to decide, since it’s already clear that the stuff lasts forever. My guess—and here I may shock you again—is that I will, for the simple reason that I like how my hair looks when I use it, and I can see the difference when I don’t. But even if I decide this isn’t worth the money, my original purchase has been worth every cent just for the reaction of Melissa Matthews, our incredible beauty editor. She typically gets very excited about new products, and while it’s almost always with good reason, her enthusiasm is such that I like to tease her that she’s been “drinking the Kool-Aid.” When I told her about this shampoo, she first gasped (a true Woman’s Day editor), then she smiled and said, “I’m glad you drink the Kool-Aid too sometimes.” So am I.

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